The Sixties

The Ed Sullivan Show, Reconsidered

Joe E. Lewis, whose wit outlived his liver, put it best: Ed Sullivan was a man who could brighten a room simply by leaving it. What Sullivan did, Fred Allen claimed, could be done by a pointer dog—if meat were rubbed on the performers. But don’t mind the peanut gallery: reliable Ed, as stiff and graceless as an undertaker, stood stage center for nearly a quartercentury as the master of ceremonies of cathode-ray civilization.

At first glance, there is no explaining this flat-lipped, rather charmless creature, the antithesis of the glib, confessional, and slickly professional smilers who would follow his lead on talk shows, game shows, beauty pageants, and other familiar formats. Down-to-earth Ed was a dose of sensible glitter, a solid salesman, an uncle drafted unexpectedly to serve the good cause of entertainment. Says Alan King, who appeared on his show 37 times, “When I was rolling with Ed, everybody said, ‘Can you explain Ed Sullivan?’ I said, ‘I don’t know what he does, but he seems to do it better than anybody else.’ ”

Yet no better than Mr. and Mrs. Ordinary American could imagine doing it themselves. Maybe that explains why, between 1948 and 1971, like nothing and no one before or since, Ed Sullivan was a really big show, maybe the biggest in television history. He was the God of Sunday Night, the man who brought old-timers their last fond glimpses of vaudeville, and who gave teenyboppers their first excited look at the Beatles. Transcending class distinctions, embracing and accommodating all generations, Ed’s taste was America’s too—from plate spinners to patriots reciting, mezzo-sopranos to mouse puppets, Mrs. Miller to soft-shoe, pas de deux, comics kvetching, and beauties with balloons braving flying arrows. Sullivan was no slouch at understanding just whom we wanted there in our living rooms right up next to the dogs and the kids—and what we wanted, he provided pronto, be it lion tamers or Sinatra, Pagliacci or the Moscow Circus, a one-legged tap dancer or the Doors.

To be seen with Sullivan Sunday night was to be a star Monday morning. To be called over to shake Ed’s hand was to connect with the Brightest Lights in the Big Room. Still, he was a guy the smarties liked to razz, a Broadway Nixon with sweat streaming down his forehead. Maybe it was his inadequacies that endeared him to a nation wary of smoothies and swindlers. Maybe it was the fact that he kept his distance, that he tensed up when people got close. As we did then.

“The choice of Ed Sullivan as master of ceremonies seems ill-advised,” wrote Jack Gould of The New York Times in the summer of 1948, after the second broadcast of the series. John Crosby of the New York Herald Tribune was less circumspect. Under the headline “Why? Why? Why?” he wrote, “One of the small but vexing questions confronting anyone in this area with a television set is ‘Why is Ed Sullivan on it every Sunday night?’ ”

In those early days, because of his golem-like manner, there arose among viewers the mistaken belief that he had a metal plate in his head. “I received hundreds of letters congratulating me on my courage in continuing despite such a handicap,” Sullivan recalled. Others applauded his triumph over Bell’s palsy.

Maladroit and malaprop, his faux pas were legion but familiar. They became American family jokes, and were the kind of embarrassing slip your pop might make at the Kiwanis club. Irving Berlin, who would outlive Sullivan, was referred to as “the late Irving Berlin”; clarinetist Benny Goodman was a “trumpeter.” Roberta Sherwood was Roberta Peters, Barbra Streisand became Barbra Streisland (off-camera). A group of Samoans were presented as “Samoans from Samoa,” while a group of native New Zealanders became “the fierce Maori tribe from New England.” Robert Merrill was greeted with the words “I’d like to prevent Robert Merrill.” Dolores Gray was welcomed as “one of the fine singing stars of Broadway now starving at the Alvin Theatre.” A closing plug for a drive to fight tuberculosis emerged as “Good night and help stamp out TV.” One week, when his sponsor Kent cigarettes was under fire for advertising to minors, and the company’s advertising agency—Lennen and Newell—had carefully placed its commercials in segments appealing to older audiences, Sullivan prefaced vaudeville trouper Blossom Seeley’s appearance with “Before all of you young people can see a veteran in action, here’s a word from Kent cigarettes.”

Jack Carter told me of a night when Sullivan, indulging his custom of recognizing distinguished audience members, asked a paraplegic to please stand and take a bow. Somehow most characteristic was Sullivan’s urging, “Let’s hear it for the Lord’s Prayer,” upon forgetting the name of singer Sergio Franchi on the 1965 Christmas show.

Television was, from inception in its electric womb, such an incubus of the masses that many regarded it as civilization’s end. The very word repulsed T. S. Eliot, who declared it “ugly,” its welding of Greek and Latin roots a mark of “ill-breeding.” The thing itself, he warned in 1950, was a “habitual form of entertainment.”

Jack Carter blows him away: “Television,” he tells me, “was the box they buried show business in.” Fitting, then, that its first and foremost ringmaster came across more like a pallbearer than a showman. Yet, paradoxically, he also ushered into the world new generations of razzmatazz. Featuring acts from Durante to Wayne and Shuster, a pair of Canadian comics (could there possibly be two?), his was the stage where stardom was conferred. Everyone, it seemed, who dwelled in or passed, however fleetingly, through the light of celebrity appeared on one or more of his 1,087 shows. A mere sampling of the names is staggering. Cut and cut again, it still produces the following scroll:

A scroll of the most legendary Sullivan-show performances: Elvis, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones. A scroll of the most bizarre: Joshua Logan’s 1953 dramatic recounting of his mental breakdown and treatment; Charlton Heston reciting “The Passion of Jesus Christ” in 1961; Kirk Douglas plugging Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest in 1963; assorted jugglers, acrobats, trained-animal acts. A scroll of the performers who appeared most often: Pigmeat Markham (21 shows), Connie Francis (26), Alan King (37), ventriloquist Rickie Layne (39), Metropolitan Opera soprano Roberta Peters (41), Jack Carter (49), Wayne and Shuster (58), Sullivan’s proudest discovery, Topo Gigio, the Italian Mouse (50), and everyone’s favorite, Señor Wences (23, according to one source; 48, according to others). Sullivan also had a great fondness for Peg Leg Bates, a one-legged dancer who performed on the show more than a dozen times.

Both Jack Carter and Alan King, who knew Sullivan before he started in television, remember him essentially as a Broadway newshound transposed from one medium to another.

“You know what the bottom line is?” King says. “He was a newspaperman. So, in a sense, what he was doing was using his talent as a newspaperman, scooping everyone. When he heard there was a nun who was singing in Brussels, he was on the next plane—and he brought back the Singing Nun.” King is referring to Sister Sourire of Belgium, whose “Dominique” was a pop hit in 1963. Sullivan would play himself in the 1966 movie The Singing Nun. (As for the Sister herself, she would later take her own life in a lesbian lovers’ suicide pact.)

Edward Vincent Sullivan was born, a twin, on September 28, 1901, on East 114th Street, in a part of Harlem which at that time was a volatile alembic of Irish, Jewish, and other immigrants. Ed’s parents, Peter and Elizabeth Smith Sullivan, had moved there not from the County Cork of Peter’s ancestry but from the upstate industrial town of Amsterdam. Following the deaths of Ed’s twin brother, Dan, and kid sister Elizabeth, the Sullivans moved to Port Chester, in suburban Westchester.

“During my childhood, Port Chester was a sleepy little village, the streets shaded by trees,” Sullivan would write. After a start at St. Mary’s Parochial, Ed hit Port Chester High, faring well in English, poorly in Latin, and winning 10 varsity letters, in baseball, basketball, football, and track. A nose twice broken in football left him merely vestigial senses of taste and smell; chipped teeth, long unfixed, left the habit of not baring them, a hesitancy to smile.

After graduation, Sullivan was hired, at $10 a week, as a sports reporter for the Port Chester Daily Item. In time he became sports editor and interviewed Babe Ruth. His next big story, at the job that followed, was a 1923 article on heavyweight champ Jack Dempsey. (Both men would later appear on the Sullivan show, Dempsey six times.)

By 1922, Sullivan—making $75 a week at the New York Evening Mail— had become a Broadway bon vivant with a fancy Durant car, custom-made shirts, hand-tailored suits, and pretty flappers with whom he made the nightclub rounds. He lived over a tavern on West 48th Street.

When the Mail folded, Sullivan ended up at the Philadelphia Ledger. From there he drifted widely, landing in 1927 at the weekend sports supplement of Bernarr Macfadden’s Graphic. Macfadden, a former indentured servant who had built his fortune with True Story and other pulp magazines, had made the Graphic the yellowest of the yellow, dedicating it to “the masses, not the classes.”

Sullivan became the Broadway bloodhound, following, though not directly, in the not inconsiderable footsteps of Walter Winchell. Sullivan’s first column appeared on June 1, 1931: “I feel, frankly,” he wrote, “that I have entered a field of writing which ranks so low that it is difficult to distinguish any one columnist. . . . The Broadway columnists have lifted themselves to distinction by borrowed gags, gossip that is not always kindly, and keyholes that too often reveal what might better be hidden.” Then, in grandiose aspersion, he concluded: “I charge the Broadway columnists with defaming the street!”

“Did you mean what you wrote today?” Winchell asked Sullivan that night at a local watering hole. Sullivan, hesitating, mumbled something about making a big entrance. Winchell said that he accepted this as an apology. But, according to what we’ll call The Sullivan Version, the new columnist was apologizing to no one. “I grabbed him by the knot in his necktie,” Ed later wrote, “and pulled him over the table, right on top of the cheesecake. ‘Apologize to you?’ I said—‘You son of a bitch, I did mean you and if you say one more word about it, I’ll take you downstairs and stick your head in the toilet bowl.’ ” According to Sullivan, Winchell rose and slunk out. Whatever the truth, the two remained bitter rivals throughout their lives.

“Phonies will receive no comfort in this space,” Sullivan wrote. “To get into this particular column will be a badge of merit and a citation—divorces will not be propagated in this column.” Not long after, however, he led with an item on the marital status of a former baseball player: “Grover Cleveland Alexander is back with his wife and off the booze.” In July he noted that “everyone who played a lead in The Marriage Circle, including Lubitsch, the director, has been divorced.”

Sullivan’s early newspaper career spanned the years when Broadway was the realm of bootleggers and racketeers, and every columnist was a liege. Back in his Evening Mail days, Ed had frequented the Club Durant, Jimmy Durante’s West 58th Street speakeasy, where the clientele included Jack Dempsey, gangster Legs Diamond, producer Billy Rose, and writer Damon Runyon.

Later, the Silver Slipper, at 201 West 48th Street, became his haunt. The Durant had shuttered, and even Jimmy himself had moved on to the Slipper, where he was performing with soft-shoe dancer Lou Clayton and singer Eddie Jackson in an act called the Three Sawdust Bums.

The Slipper was run by a syndicate headed by Owney “The Killer” Madden and his henchmen Frankie Marlow and Big Bill Duffy. Madden was no stranger to the press. He had given Winchell a Stutz Bearcat and appears to have set up his interview with Al Capone. Marlow, also the gangster’s pal, owned pieces of a couple of boxers. Duffy managed Primo Carnera, the gentle Italian giant whose infamous heavyweight-championship reign (1933–34) was regarded as an orchestral masterpiece of Mob fight fixing.

When Marlow was gunned down near Flushing Cemetery in June 1929, Sullivan delivered this eulogy in his Graphic column:

“Along Broadway they are selling extras telling of Frank Marlow’s death, and yet some of us almost expect to see his fine eyes crinkle in a pleased smile and to hear his cheery, ‘Hello, pardner,’ a salutation that was not paralleled along Broadway for pure warmth of feeling. . . .

“To some, Frank Marlow was a racketeer. . . . To us, who rejoiced in his friendship, he was an eager, impulsive, loyal friend.” At this, the typographical tears burst into glory: “Good bye, Frank, and God bless you! Our hearts tell us we have lost a friend and wholesouled comrade, a pardner, in the complete sense, an ace.”

Throughout Primo Carnera’s suspect rise, Sullivan was his foremost press supporter. In his column of April 25, 1930, the *Daily Mirror’*s Dan Parker wrote, “Speaking, I presume for the Duffy interests which he seems to represent, Mr. Sullivan . . . as he confesses, ‘the original booster of the big man from the South of Italy,’ offers to take ‘any odds such a scoffer as Danyell Parker will offer.’ ” Dismissing both the offer and “Primo and his faking entourage,” Parker ended on a provocative note: “And, oh, what I know about Eddie Sullivan!”

Sullivan sought legal recourse, but lost in State Supreme Court against Parker and the Mirror. He won on appeal, but ultimately settled for legal fees.

When Vincent “Mad Dog” Coll was murdered, possibly at the behest of Owney Madden, Sullivan was moved to a certain sort of poetry. “What a dreadful feeling must come over a Coll—as the ugly snout of a submachine gun adjusts its evil leer,” he wrote on February 10, 1932. “Death has arrived . . . and the shortest path between two points . . . is the path traveled by a leaden pellet.”

Sullivan claimed to have once traversed the path’s narrow outskirts. “I was threatened by Scarface Al Capone’s mob in 1929,” he wrote; “they mistook me for Edward Dean Sullivan, who wrote Rattling the Cup on Chicago Crime, an exposé of Chicago gangland killings.” This may be another instance of The Sullivan Version: Edward Dean Sullivan was known to have been a Capone chum.

The Sullivan Version is encountered in full flower in the story our hero told in the New York Post of a confrontation in Reuben’s restaurant with gangster Larry Fay and entertainment writer Mark Hellinger, a cohort of Walter Winchell’s.

“Now this guy Hellinger had always been one of my pet peeves, a real phony, with that phony Broadway smile and those dark blue shirts with the pinned collar and that Broadway air about him. . . . I’d met Hellinger for the first time only a little while before; we were standing in front of the Ziegfeld, and you know the first thing he said to me? ‘Listen, Sullivan,’ he said, ‘you’ve been pulling an awful lot of boners lately. You need some straightening out, straightening out with the right people.’

“ ‘You listen to me, Hellinger,’ I told him. ‘Straighten yourself out first, you with your phony Broadway airs and your rewrites of O. Henry. You’re a phony, and a lousy writer, too. I don’t need straightening out. . . . I’ve been a pretty good sporting writer . . . and I had a byline before you were even heard of.’ ”

According to Sullivan, nothing further had passed between them until this fateful day.

“They sat down and Hellinger leaned over to me. ‘Remember what I told you once?’ he said, ‘about your needing some straightening out . . . ’

“I never gave him a chance to finish.

“ ‘Listen, Mark,’ I said, ‘I told you what I thought of you the last time and I’ll tell you again. You’re a phony. . . . And another thing,’ I said, ‘if you’re looking for trouble, you just don’t know what tough guys are. I’ll get a couple of my guys after you and you’ll wind up with your ears lopped off!’ ”

In 1926 at a nightclub known as the Casa Lopez, Sullivan met Sylvia Weinstein, the fresh-out-of-high-school daughter of an Upper West Side real-estate agent. They were married in a civil service on April 28, 1930. (A Catholic ceremony was performed by a priest in West Orange, New Jersey, three days later, on May 1.) The 28-year-old Ed was at the Graphic then, and the paper’s not-so-accurate report of the marriage listed Sylvia’s age as 26. The couple’s only child was born later that year. She was given the name Elizabeth for Ed’s sister and his mother, who had just passed on.

The Graphic folded in 1932, and Sullivan was brought by Captain Joe Patterson to the Daily News, one of the oldest and biggest tabloids. It was a good job, but came with a deep cut in pay, down to $200 a week from $375.

The gossip racket, however, was not his only source of income. At the Graphic, he had acted as the master of ceremonies for an annual All-Sports Dinner. When Winchell left the paper, Sullivan took over booking the entertainment as well as the sporting personalities. This led to a 1930 radio program sponsored by Adam Hats, which in turn led to a grand-a-week hosting job for another program.

By early 1932, Sullivan was affiliated with the Columbia Broadcasting System. According to Sullivan’s biographer, Michael David Harris, it was Ed who introduced the first radio broadcasts of Jack Benny, Jimmy Durante, Irving Berlin, and Florenz Ziegfeld. Also in 1932, Sullivan served as master of ceremonies at the $100-a-plate dinner of the United Jewish Federation at the Plaza Hotel, after which he struck a deal to produce a variety show at the Paramount Theatre, as Winchell had done before him. Sullivan’s revue, Gems of the Town, brought him $3,750 a week. Other Sullivan stage shows followed at the Loew’s State Theatre, and in 1936 he began hosting the Harvest Moon Ball for the Daily News.

The Sullivans certainly lived well during the Depression and the blues that followed. Sylvia, however, remembered her husband entering his 30s as a brooder, a distinctly dissatisfied guy. A March 1937 magazine portrait described Ed as a man whose “domestic arrangements” lay “midway between those of Winchell and [columnist Louis] Sobol. The former is rarely seen with his wife, while Sobol takes his to all theatrical openings.” Sullivan took his wife to big openings, but was otherwise a loner. He was, as always, one of the rounders—the insiders, the mobsters, the hangers-out—who hit the nightclubs toward the hour of the wolf.

The writer continued: “He seldom gets back home before five A.M., in the meanwhile having taken in, on a typical night, ‘21,’ the Stork Club, the Hollywood, Dave’s Blue Room, Lindy’s and Jimmy Kelly’s. . . . Courvoisier brandy is his only but not single drink; then it’s bed until one or two in the afternoon. The column is written—at home. That takes a couple of hours and Sullivan then drives down to the Daily News, reads his mail and waits while the composing room gives him a proof.”

Later in 1937, Sullivan left Broadway for Hollywood, moving his family to a house with a garden in Beverly Hills. For three years, he wrote a Hollywood gossip column for the News. Like Winchell, he would get a taste of moving pictures. On the West Coast, he tried his hand at screen scenarios: Hal Roach’s There Goes My Heart and two Universal films, Ma, He’s Making Eyes at Me and Big Town Czar, in which Sullivan also appeared. All three films were ignored and forgotten.

After a brief return to New York, Sullivan announced, in November 1940, that he was assuming the editorship of Billy Wilkerson’s Hollywood Reporter. Captain Patterson of the News wired, “Rebus sic stanibus, you can stay with us as long as you want.” Returning to the News for good, Sullivan moved his family into the Hotel Astor, at Broadway and 44th Street, in the heart of Times Square.

Betty Sullivan was 10. “It was horrible,” she tells me. “It was no place for a young girl to live. I went to Marymount at that time, and I’d walk over to Fifth Avenue and step over drunks and unsavory characters.”

But, as Betty says, “it was convenient for my dad for us to live at the Astor.” Right across the street was the Loew’s where Ed put on his shows.

In 1944 the Sullivans moved from the Astor to the much swankier Delmonico, at Park Avenue and 59th Street. Living there “was much better,” Betty recalled. She remembered that, as at the Astor, there were no home-cooked meals. “We’d go out to dinner every evening.” She described her father as a sort of intimate stranger: “He didn’t have many friends. I think, as a father, he related more to me as I got older. He would correct my papers and took an interest in that part of my life, and I remember I would get exasperated and say, ‘I wanna make my own mistakes,’ and he would say, ‘Can’t you profit from my experience?,’ which I didn’t want to, I wanted to learn by making my own mistakes.” Asked if he was a domineering sort of fellow, Betty says, “I guess so. He had a temper.”

In 1942, Sullivan co-produced Harlem Cavalcade, reuniting some greats of black vaudeville, including Noble Sissle, Flournoy Miller, and Tim Moore. It was early evidence of Sullivan’s longtime support of nonwhite entertainers.

Sullivan also served as a guest interviewer on the CBS Vox Pop radio program. Then, at a quarter past seven, Eastern War Time, Monday, September 13, 1943, he began his first really big show: Ed Sullivan Entertains, a weekly CBS radio series of 15-minute celebrity interviews broadcast from the ‘21’ Club and sponsored by Mennen. In April of 1946 came The Ed Sullivan Program, a weekly quarter-hour collection of commentaries, sponsored by Edgeworth Smoking Tobacco.

The Harvest Moon Ball of September 3, 1947, was the first to be broadcast by the new medium of television. The Sullivan Version claimed that he wasn’t aware that the program was being aired live. At the same time, however, he was alert to the possibilities of television. Through Marlo Lewis of the Blaine Thompson advertising agency, he approached CBS with a proposal for a program called Pros and Cons, in which golf professionals would give tips on how to improve one’s game. The idea was rejected by the network. But when Worthingon Miner, the network’s director of program development, later mulled the notion of a Sunday-night variety show, he thought of Sullivan and the telecast of the Harvest Moon Ball.

A CBS press release in May of 1948 announced “a full-hour Sunday revue series, titled ‘You’re the Top’ and tentatively scheduled to begin on the CBS Television Network June 20, 9:00–10:00 PM, EDST”

Broadcast from the Maxine Elliott Theatre, on West 39th Street, the show premiered as scheduled, but under a different name: Toast of the Town. This first show, now lost (of the 1,087 shows, 30 are missing; the earliest surviving dates to November of 1948), consisted of eight acts, including Rodgers and Hammerstein, singer Monica Lewis (sister of the show’s first producer, Marlo Lewis), boxing referee Ruby Goldstein (discussing the upcoming Louis-Walcott fight), and, for human interest and to build a local audience, New York City singing fireman John Kokoman. The budget was reported at under $1,400, of which the show’s headliners, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, making their TV debut, received $200.

The old Billy Rose Theater, originally Hammerstein’s Theater, at 1697 Broad-way, was converted by CBS into a studio for the show, which moved from nine o’clock to eight so that kids could see it before being put to bed. Sullivan survived bad reviews—and accusations that he used the influence of his column to get star performers to appear for chicken feed. But he prevailed over the competition: Philco Television Playhouse, Perry Como, and The Colgate Comedy Hour. By 1954—the year he introduced Will Jordan’s Ed Sullivan impersonation with a good-humored reference to “this rigor-mortis face of mine”—his own Sullivan Productions had assumed total control of the show. By 1955, it was The Ed Sullivan Show. By the following year, CBS was paying him $176,000 a year under a new, 20-year contract. (Yet another contract would follow in 1961; he would later be taking in a reported 20 grand a week.) In 1957, when Sullivan celebrated his show’s ninth anniversary, John Crosby of the Herald Tribune, one of his earliest and most avid critics, wrote, “Mr. Sullivan has grown no more skillful with his hands or his face or his prose. But he is still there, which is more than you can say about a lot of people who are enormously skillful in all these departments. There is a great lesson in this for all of us, but I’m damned if I know what it is.”

The pay helped keep the performers loyal. Alan King remembers getting $7,500 for a nine-minute bit. But just as valuable, he says, was the exposure: “I was working Vegas for a thousand dollars, I went on The Ed Sullivan Show—the next time I got $2,500. Every time I went on the Sullivan show, my price went up.” Connie Francis says that she tried to schedule her Sullivan appearances before her Vegas openings, to ensure a packed house. “If you went on The Ed Sullivan Show,”she says, “everybody knew who you were the next day.”

In 1955, Ed bought a country place, a 130-acre dairy farm with a swimming pool, in Southbury, Connecticut. The Delmonico suite, however, would remain the home and headquarters of both Sullivan and his show. Actually, it had now become suites: No. 1101, adjoining the original Sullivan suite, 1102, had been acquired as an office.

Betty recalls that after she graduated from high school, “my dad helped me get into U.C.L.A. through Joe E. Brown, the comedian, who was a big man on campus as far as sports. I got in through the sports department, really, not on a scholarship, mind you, but just through the sports department. My high school, Miss Hewitt’s, didn’t have a gymnasium, so I didn’t even have that credit, which they required at U.C.L.A.”

It was there that she met and dated Robert Precht, who described his first meeting with Betty’s parents, at Chasen’s, as “a fairly tense evening.” Precht, an idealistic young liberal who was studying Russian for a degree in international relations, found himself discussing politics with Ed.

“My dad thought Bob was a Communist,” Betty says.

Ed was a conservative man, to put it mildly. In 1933, when Marlene Dietrich attended a matinee in slacks, he denounced her for “appearing in men’s clothes,” concluding, with a bitter sigh, “Well, what can you expect from one of Hitler’s cuties?” The following year, he declared in a column, “My resentment of effeminates as performers is just as keen as ever,” and “My intemperance of dirty jokes and dirty songs has not tempered.” The revues presented by him, he said, proved “that a clean show can be crisp and entertaining without the injection of smuttiness or double meanings.”

In a 1957 New York Journal-American series on Sullivan by Jim Bishop, Ed stated the philosophy of his show in 17 words: “Open big, have a good comedy act, put in something for the children, keep the show clean.” Bishop also enumerated Sullivan’s major influences. His father came first, then: “(2) his mother and his church, (3) Sir Walter Scott, (4) high school sports, where the credo is ‘Play hard and play to win, but play clean.’ ”

Clean, clean, clean. Jack Carter, who once tried to do a routine mentioning the human navel, discovered the volcanic intensity of a Sullivan eruption. “You’d do a run-through at noon and kill the people and then you’d have to go up to his room, where he was being shaved, and he’d lace into you in the worst language you ever heard. ‘How dare you do that shit on my show! You really think you’re gonna get away with that fucking gag about a navel? That’s a fucking hole, you little shit. You little fuck, you do that shit on my show.’ ”

He was, Carter says, “a strange man. He was very paradoxical. He was the height of nunnery, and then, offstage, he was vile and vulgar and angry. But only concerning his show.”

Sullivan himself recalled that “on three occasions, at dress rehearsals, I had our wardrobe chief, Bill Walstrom, cover up with tulle the cleavage in the gowns of Kim Novak, Jeanne Crain and Esther Williams. Yet when each of these stars emerged from the wings, the tulle mysteriously had disappeared. We solved that simply by focusing the cameras on their faces.”

In one infamous incident, on October 18, 1964, Jackie Mason was banished from the show for allegedly making an obscene gesture at Sullivan. Mason, who felt that Sullivan’s practice of standing off-camera and grimly counting down time with his fingers had a distracting effect on the studio audience, had supposedly responded with a finger flurry of his own. But in a libel-and-slander suit filed by Mason, the judge—according to the comic—could discern no offensive gesture by Mason.

“The gesture,” Mason told me, “was in his mind. He used four-letter words and dirty gestures as a way of life, because he was a Broadway street guy. I was a yeshiva student and a rabbi. I didn’t know from dirty gestures.” The feud was, by Sullivan standards, short-lived. Two years later at the Las Vegas airport, Sullivan expressed regret. “It was a very touching speech he made,” says Mason. “It was a very long, apologetic speech, and two weeks later I was on the show again.”

The effects of the scandal, however, were, according to Mason, long-lived. “It basically destroyed my career for at least 10, 15 years. Because in those days, if you had an image of a filthy person, you were wiped out. Today, if you have an image as a filthy person, you become a sensation.”

To Mason, Sullivan “was a wonderful guy. Off the show, he was the nicest, classiest man. On the show itself, he became very intense. . . . He became very nervous before each show. He was just trying to make the show as perfect as possible, and he was very insecure.”

There were other celebrated feuds: with Frank Sinatra (who in 1955 called “for movie performers to stop appearing cuffo on commercial TV shows to plug pictures”) and with his competitors such as Jack Paar (who were getting guests for scale, while Sullivan was paying them thousands). Alan King, who describes Ed as “my best friend but worst enemy,” says that when he appeared on Garry Moore’s show, “Ed literally came close to slapping me in the face at Danny’s Hideaway. He called me a traitor. . . . For five years Ed didn’t talk to me.”

In the Winchell feud, whose true origin lies clouded in contradiction, there would not be as much as a gesture of reconciliation until 1967, almost 40 years after it began. “They hated each other,” Betty says.

Above all else—above women in pants and sissies and smut and anatomical holes—Sullivan hated Commies. He once suggested that the House Committee on Un-American Activities subpoena choreographer Jerome Robbins because “in my office not long ago he revealed he had been a card-carrying member of the Communist Party.” He publicly denounced John Garfield, Charlie Chaplin, and Arthur Miller; lauded Red Channels, the broadcasters’ blacklist guide; held court in his Delmonico suite for performers “eager to secure a certification of loyalty”; and, according to Alvin Davis of the New York Post, “proposed a quasi-official agency to issue clearances for television personalities.”

He felt he had helped keep black performers from Communism, a point he made while commending their decency: “I’ve never had to censor the material of a Negro performer” or “ask a Negro girl or woman to correct her costume,” he wrote in 1956. “So, when the Commies were trying to take over AFTRA [American Federation of Television and Radio Artists], the Negro performers always voted solidly with me to defeat them.”

Betty Sullivan and Bob Precht were married in Los Angeles in 1952, the year of their college graduations. Bob spent four years in the navy, but found his interest drifting from his planned career in diplomatic service. “When we lived in D.C., we were with the Sullivans much more, and I was able to get a taste of the television business, which was . . . very appealing, very exciting, and very glamorous. So, when I got out of the navy, in 1956, I went into the television business.”

Marlo Lewis, who produced the Sullivan show, found Precht a position with the children’s show Winky-Dink and You, which folded in 1957. “About four years later, Marlo decided to either quit or retire or make a career move. Ed obviously looked in my direction. . . . There’s no question that I was young, and certainly, I guess, there was favoritism.”

Bob Precht became associate producer of the show in 1959, producer in 1960. He learned quickly that the show was his father-in-law’s life. “My father just wasn’t a very social person,” Betty says. “He really was the person people saw on Sunday.” Ed’s eldest grandchild, Rob, says, while he was very supportive, “deep down, I think, he thought family life was overrated, and that the symbols of family life tired him a bit.”

“It was a life cycle,” Bob Precht says. “I mean, he lived for that Sunday night, and his whole week, particularly as he got older, would be a preparation for that Sunday night.”

Bob remembers that life cycle well. “Monday, we would have a production meeting. Myself, the director, the music director, the scenic designer, the choreographer, the production team. We would see what the lineup was and what had to be done, and in some instances we would begin rehearsals very early. We would begin rehearsals as early as that Monday or Tuesday if it was a fairly complicated production number, or a Wayne and Shuster sketch, Bert Lahr sketch—something like that. . . . Our production offices were on 57th Street, and we had some rehearsal halls there, but sometimes we would go to a rehearsal hall over on Eighth Avenue. With musical acts, it would be a matter of meeting with them to determine what music we could use, et cetera. That would continue through the week, and then on Saturday we would go into the studio and basically block it out. In some instances, Ed would come over to those rehearsals. During the week, he and I basically communicated by phone, or if there was something special, I’d go over to the Delmonico, or we’d meet at Gino’s, on Lexington.

“Ed, because of his nocturnal life, would usually have his breakfast or lunch about three in the afternoon, at Gino’s, when the waiters were having their lunch. Ed would be the only customer. We’d sit in the back of the restaurant talking about various show matters. By Saturday we were basically on our feet. But the big moment of truth was the dress rehearsal, which was on Sunday afternoon, and we had to have everything in order, ready to show an audience. Ed would come over. He knew the lineup and he knew the people, and he would dictate his copy to one of the girls, who would put it on the TelePrompTer, and then we would have our dress rehearsal. . . . Between the end of that dress rehearsal and going on-air, he would make substantial changes. That was Ed’s newspaper approach to show business. He would edit, he would change, and if something was particularly weak, he would drop it. . . . I had the unhappy job of going to the acts or their agents and having to say, ‘I’m sorry, we can’t use you.’ ”

Unlike most singers, Connie Francis had carte blanche to sing whatever she wanted. She remembers an incident backstage, when she was going to sing “My Yiddishe Momme,” from her album Connie Francis Sings Jewish Favorites. Sophie Tucker, who had recorded “My Yiddishe Momme” in the late 20s, became outraged that Connie should sing what she called “my song.” As Connie recalls, Jerry Lewis stuck his nose in, and he and Tucker threatened to walk off the show if Connie—Concetta Franconero—was allowed to desecrate this hallowed Tucker heirloom. “Ed,” she said, “made them reconsider.”

Robert Arthur, the show’s music and creative coordinator, remembers that “Ed’s main interest was in booking the show and finding the acts. . . . It was sort of up to us to figure out exactly what that person might do on the show.” Robert remembers the Motown acts as being “pleasant to work with.” Kate Smith, on the other hand, was “an iron butterfly.”

Another important figure in Sullivan’s life was Carmine Santullo, the secretary and right-hand man who had served Sullivan since the early 1930s. Rob Precht remembers Santullo as seeming “slightly Dickensian to me. I mean, he was someone I imagine out of a Dickens novel, the faithful retainer. I loved Carmine, but there was something lugubrious in his appearance. He would prepare a lamb chop for my grandfather on a hot plate. Although they had a stove, they would use the hot plate.”

“Once it started,” says Jack Carter, “the show was Ed’s life. He was concerned with every small act, every detail. He’d be there at rehearsal all day. . . . He fought you tooth and nail for every joke, every line.” Not everything went smoothly. Carter remembers the night Frankie Laine was singing “I Believe” with a live horse pulling him in a buggy. “He started singing and the horse started dropping these lumps. They didn’t know you got to clean out animals before they go on.”

Problems or delays were rarely traceable to Ed, who wouldn’t stop working—even when it hurt. Under the heading HE WAS AFRAID OF THE KNIFE, Jim Bishop, writing in the New York Journal-American, gave a graphic account of Ed’s ulcer: “It is situated in the duodenum and, when it erupts, it locks the stomach exit in a closed position. When this happens, Ed sticks two tubes through his nostrils and down into his esophagus. Then he pumps out his stomach.” Ed finally confronted the knife in June 1960.

Despite his show’s reputation as lowbrow, Sullivan was the greatest supporter of opera on commercial television. “He loved Roberta Peters,” Bob Precht remembers, and, indeed, the soprano was one of the show’s most frequent performers. Under a 1956 contract with the Metropolitan Opera, Sullivan scheduled several scenes of opera for the show, beginning with 18 minutes of Tosca featuring Maria Callas and George London. The opera presentations, however, resulted in a drop in ratings, and the contract was ended early in 1957.

Sullivan had better luck with rock ’n’ roll. He featured Louis Jordan, one of the genre’s progenitors, on September 19, 1948; the Ravens on January 2, 1949; and in November 1955 dedicated a segment to the new black music, presenting Bo Diddley, LaVern Baker, and the Five Keys.

Sullivan was recuperating from an automobile accident in the late summer of 1956. Thus it came to pass that Charles Laughton, who filled in for him on the night of September 9, introduced Elvis Presley for the first of the three appearances for which Sullivan had agreed to pay a total of 50 grand. (This was barely more, per appearance, than the 13 grand he had paid Sonja Henie for her 1952 ice-spectacular television debut.) Presley was not a Sullivan scoop—he already had nine network performances behind him—but he did bring in the ratings, beating by 5 percent the Sullivan audience record set in 1954 by a show featuring Elizabeth Taylor, Julius LaRosa, and the Harlem Globetrotters. As Sullivan himself observed, “Presley’s style was not as agitated as that of Johnnie Ray when Ray made his TV debut on our stage January 6, 1952.” It was true: not until Presley’s final appearance did the cameras cut off his gyrations from the waist down. As Sullivan said, “There could never be any possible chance for anything offensive to happen on our stage. I am in control of the cameras.”

Bob Dylan was scheduled to appear on May 12, 1963. But he came into rehearsal on the appointed Sunday with “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues,” a whimsical little song to which the CBS censors objected. Offered the chance to choose another song, he decided not to do the show at all.

The Beatles, on February 9, 1964, were a coup, and a new ratings record: the largest viewing audience yet in television history. It was after this that Sullivan entered into the negotiations with CBS that won him ownership of all past and future shows. From this vast and invaluable archive, acquired in 1990 by the producer Andrew Solt, there will soon emerge what promises to be one of the best exhibitions of rock ’n’ roll archaeology ever unveiled, The Sullivan Pop and Rock Classics, a 20-part series of half-hour segments that will premiere on VH1 in January 1998.

Tamer than Presley, the Beatles, in their cute little suits and ties, with their cute little smiles, posed no threat. The Rolling Stones, whom Sullivan first presented on October 25, 1964, were another matter entirely. With their five appearances through January ’67, the show seemed to enter dangerous territory beyond the absolute control of its aging master and mediocrator. Mitzi Gaynor’s performance of “Too Darn Hot,” on February 16, 1964, was another omen: it was as lascivious a moment as television had ever known.

And—this might mean something—it was also during this period, on September 19, 1965, that the Sullivan show passed from black and white to color.

On January 15, 1967, as Robert Arthur remembers, the Stones “were going to sing one of their hits, ‘Let’s Spend the Night Together.’ Well, at that time, that was absolutely . . . it would be like saying, ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck.’ People’s eyes would roll in their heads at the network. So I was sent to deal with them, because I was also a songwriter . . . and I came up with a phrase that was almost the same thing and sounded almost the same, and it was ‘Let’s spend some time together.’ Mick Jagger agreed . . . but then, on the show . . .”

The Stones honored their promise in performance, with Jagger parodying the edit with his ironic glances. “I was sort of on their side,” says Robert Arthur, looking back. It would be November 23, 1969, almost three years later, before the Stones returned to the show, for the last time, with a pre-Altamont “Gimme Shelter” that portended changing times.

On September 17, 1967, came the Doors. The self-styled “Erotic Politicians” refused to sanitize their song “Light My Fire” by deleting the word “higher,” which the Sullivan forces considered a blatant drug reference. Jim Morrison’s band never made it back for a second show. They might not have wanted to; it had become an anachronism. During the program of December 10, 1967, the CBS studio at Broadway and 53rd Street was renamed the Ed Sullivan Theater. But all was not well. Two weeks later, on Christmas Eve, George Carlin managed to slip a marijuana joke into one of his routines.

“The only live show with a dead host”—again, the line is courtesy of Jack Carter—itself began to die. In March of 1971, CBS announced that Sullivan would not be a part of its coming fall schedule. The last show was broadcast on May 30. The time slot would be filled by another movie of the week.

Ed’s old enemy, Walter Winchell, died in February 1972. Sylvia died in March 1973. Without his show, without hate, without love, Ed Sullivan was lost. “He was a shattered man,” his grandson Rob says. “He really didn’t have any point, or probably didn’t feel any point, in living.”

When Rob was attending Scarsdale Junior High School, his father and grandfather had arranged for him to interview Mick Jagger backstage for the school magazine. “He would look at me during the course of my stupid questions and say, ‘You know, you look like your father,’ and then we would have a few more questions, and he would say, ‘You know, you talk like your grandfather,’ and we would continue on, and he would say, ‘You know, you walk like your grandfather.’” Now Rob, who went on to become a lawyer, says of himself and his grandfather, “I’ve inherited his show-business sensibility.” A few years ago, as a public defender, he represented Mohammad Salameh in the World Trade Center bombing case. Today, at the University of Michigan Law School, he heads a program to create and promote pro bono and public-service legal work. “In many ways, I think I’m kind of like the Ed Sullivan of public service.”

Rob was in his late teens in his grandfather’s final years. “Shortly before he died, when he was in frail health, I remember taking him back to his hotel from a restaurant. It was about 11 at night, and as I was walking with him down the lonely sidewalks, hoping that no one would recognize him, because I didn’t want to have to stop, I noticed two women in the distance walking toward us. As they came closer, it was obvious to me that they were prostitutes. I became anxious because I didn’t want them to recognize my grandfather and engage him in conversation or anything like that. I just wanted to get back to the hotel. So, as we got closer, I got more and more concerned, and just as we got to within five feet of passing them, my grandfather yelled out to them, ‘Oh, hello, girls!’”

He entered Lenox Hill Hospital on September 6, 1974, suffering from cancer of the esophagus. Some weeks later, on October 13, a Sunday, he died there, just after his 73rd birthday. Three days later, two thousand mourners converged on St. Patrick’s, where Cardinal Cooke officiated at a Requiem High Mass.

From ‘ill-advised’ choice to host of the longest-running variety show in television, from cramming tulle into cleavage to ‘Hello, girls!’ There is simply no explaining Ed Sullivan. John Leonard, the Schopenhauer of television exegetes, has been trying. As long ago as 1975, he described Sullivan as “what Ezra Pound might have meant by ‘The fourth; the dimension of stillness / And the power over wild beasts.’ ” Almost 22 years later, Leonard is still at it—nigh as long a pursuit as the span of Sullivan’s show. In his recent book, Smoke and Mirrors, the chapter “Ed Sullivan Died for Our Sins” presents Ed as “our father and our Fisher King.” But, in the end, high-voltage erudition is but tulle in the hole of unknowing.

It is April, the cruelest month, or so I have heard it said. I sit with Señor Wences in his memory-filled West Side Manhattan apartment on the eve of his 101st birthday.

“What was Ed Sullivan like as a human being?”

“Difficult,” answers his wife, from somewhere nearby.

“Yes,” says the master ventriloquist, “very difficult, very difficult.” He shows me a hand-mask device, works his fingers into it, calls out to his wife: “You have one orange? Orange? One orange?”

“An orange? No, I don’t have an orange,” she replies. “Would you like a ball instead of an orange?”

He accepts the ball, bounces it from his ankle toward a hoop in the hand mask’s mouth. Almost—but not quite. He shrugs, takes out another puppet-head hand device, introduces it as “Ernesto.”

I remember the bizarre little face he made by painting lips on his forefinger and thumb, placing eyes and a little blond wig over his knuckles. I always thought it was a girl. But, no, its name, I have been reminded, is Johnny. Originally, in Spain, Juanito; then, in America, Johnny.

“Was Johnny always a boy? Did you ever do a girl?”

“No. Johnny. I use the name Johnny.”

I remember the head in the box. “Ees all right?” he would ask it. “Ees all right,” it would answer. Jerry Lewis feared the head. I loved the head. The head’s name was Pedro. The head’s name is Pedro.

“Do you have Pedro here?”

“Pedro. Yes. He here.”

“Where?”

“He wants to see Pedro.”

“Pedro is asleep,” says the wife. She enters the room, gestures hopelessly to a bottom shelf blocked by heavy boxes. Wences shrugs.

“Was Pedro your favorite?” I ask.

“No. Johnny. Johnny more.”

“Did Ed Sullivan have a sense of humor?”

“No, none,” answers the wife.

“No,” says Wences.

I have brought with me a copy of The Oracle, by the 17th-century Spanish sage Baltasar Gracián y Morales. What better than this volume to have the wise man Wenceslao Moreno sign? He kindly and with care takes to the task, laboring at an accompanying illustration.

This afternoon is my pot of gold at the end of the monochromatic rainbow of Edward Vincent Sullivan. I ask Señor Wences the secret of life. “How have you lived so long and happily?”

He shrugs, smiles. “I am very happy to make laugh people.”

In the language of Gracián, in the language of Gracián’s ancient countryman Martial, the syntax is perfect, eloquent. Mrs. Moreno, who speaks seven languages, lights a cigarette. I light a cigarette. Wences beams amid the secondary smoke. I ask him if he smokes. He regards me spryly, slyly.

“No. Johnny smokes. And Pedro, he drinks.”

It is time to go. Señor Wences rises, walks me to the elevator, waits with me, advises with a gesture of his thumb that I should please remember to push the button upon entering if I want the elevator to move. I wish him 20 years more, and I give him a hug.

I press the button and descend. The true secret of life, of longevity and happiness, is to me now clear but unstated. As Gracián, in the 59th aphorism, counsels us to “end well,” so I here end by sharing the secret with you: Speak to your hand often.